We are doing it again! We’re homing in on the micro: 100-word, 250-word, and 400-word stories. In March 2025 SmokeLong is hosting The March Micro Marathon, a 24-day workshop with a new writing task each day, peer review in small groups, 3 webinars, a reading and interview with Michelle Ross and the editors of 100 Word Story, and 3 competitions with cash prizes. It’s a lot. And as if this weren’t enough, editors from The Cincinnati Review, 100 Word Story, and The Citron Review will be helping us choose the winners of our March Micro Marathon competitions! AND, we’ll pitch in 2 months (April and May) of SmokeLong Fitness because everyone needs a cool-down after a strenuous marathon, right?
Last year’s March Micro Marathon was a huge success. Together we drafted thousands of micros, and some were accepted for publication even before the marathon was over. We expect 2025 to be even livelier. If you’re passionate about workshopping, we encourage you to join the race.
We will have competitions, open only to workshop participants, for 100-word, 250-word, and 400-word stories. The prizes will be at least $100 each.
The peer-review workshop begins on March 3 with onboarding starting March 1. We’d like everyone to be in the workshop and ready to go on March 1. Once we hit the page on March 3, we will not look up from our papers until March 26. Unless someone needs a nap. We are big nappers.
Price (non-SmokeLong Fitness participants): $120 BOOK HERE
For SmokeLong Fitness participants: Your payment details are in the workshop.
Online Event Schedule (all events recorded for participants unable to attend live)
“Tiny but Deep” with Melissa Llanes Brownlee
Date: March 1
Time: 7pm NYC
From borrowed forms, to plural POV, from breathless paragraphs, to code-switching, and so much more, let’s stretch our storytelling limbs and dive into the depths of what a micro can do for your writing. Join us as we explore your childhood memories, your mother tongue, your knowledge of myths and fairy tales to write that perfect and compelling story in a tiny but deep package.
Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in Quarterly West, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Matchbook, Bluestem, Sunlight Press and Cutleaf Journal, and honored in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin (2022) and Kahi and Lua (2022) and look out for Bitter over Sweet (2025) from Santa Fe Writers Project. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.
“Let’s Get Weird!” with Tara Campbell
Date: March 9
Time: 8pm NYC
Unleash the unreal in your writing, both in fiction and creative nonfictions. We’ll explore multiple ways of stretching reality to turn common experiences into uncommon stories.
Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse. She teaches flash and speculative fiction, and is the author of a novel, two hybrid collections, and two short story collections. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, was released by SFWP in September 2024. Find out more at www.taracampbell.com
100 Word Story — Reading and Interview
Date: March 16
Time: Noon NYC
One hundred seems perfect. It’s the basis of percentages, the perfect test score, the boiling point of water (Celsius), purity. Pythagoreans considered 100 as divine because it is the square (10 x 10) of the divine decad (10). Even a Scrabble set has 100 tiles.
And yet 100 is a fragment. It’s an arbitrary marker, like the “First 100 Days” of a president’s term—merely a promise of what’s to come, or a whiff of what has passed.
The whole is a part and the part is a whole. The 100-word format forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste in a way that even most flash fiction doesn’t. At the same time the brevity of the form allows the writer “to keep a story free from explanation,” as Walter Benjamin wrote.
For life doesn’t lend itself so easily to our elucidations. “Incoherence is preferable to a distorting order,” said Roland Barthes.
None of us will ever know the whole story in other words. We can only collect a bag full of shards that each seem perfect.
“When Less is More and Less is Not Enough: Compression and Expansion in Flash” with Christopher Allen
Date: March 23
Time: 2pm NYC
So you’ve drafted dozens of micros in The March Micro Marathon 2025 but you’re unsure if they’re ready for primetime. In this 90-minute webinar/workshop we’ll look at why some micros feel incomplete and some micros feel overstuffed. And we’ll discuss actionable steps to editing these micros so that they feel complete, subtle, and exciting.
Christopher Allen, the publisher and EIC of SmokeLong Quarterly, is the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (Matter Press, 2018) and the episodic satire Conversations with S. Teri O’Type. He was the 2023 judge of the Bridport Prize.
